Troy Alexander, a graduate student at Georgia Tech,
spotted the first of these structures on June 7. The little, seemingly
woven fence was parked on the underside of a blue tarp near the Tambopata Research Center, in southeastern Peru. He later spotted three more of the bizarre enclosures on tree trunks in the jungle...

He described the fences as small – about 2 centimeters across...

“I have no idea what made it, or even what it is,” said William Eberhard, an entomologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

“I’ve seen the photo, but have no idea what animal might be responsible,” echoed Norm Platnick, curator emeritus of spiders at the American Museum of Natural History.

“I don’t know what it is,” said arachnologist Linda Rayor, of Cornell University. “My guess is something like a lacewing, but I don’t really know.”..

“I have no idea,” said Todd Gilligan of Colorado State University, and president of The Lepidopterists’ Society.
“Some moths construct an ‘egg fence’ around eggs, using scales from the
abdomen to protect the eggs,” he said. “So constructing fences around
objects isn’t unheard of, but I haven’t seen anything like this before.”

TYWKIWDBI gets about a thousand visits a year from readers in Peru. Perhaps one of you know what creature creates these.

Addendum: A comment on another website pointed out the similarity to a "fence" made by Ribbed Cocoon-maker moths. But in that case, what would be inside the "fence" would be a cocoon, not an egg case, because the adult moth (presumably) is not capable of spinning silk - that's the role of the larval caterpillar.

If constructions like these are being found on tarpaulins, then I don't think they represent the fruiting bodies of slime molds or fungi. I'm betting on an arachnid.

Addendum #2: The mystery has been solved. The structure is indeed the work of a spider, species identity still to be determined, but at least for the present tentatively (and cleverly) dubbed the "silkhenge" spider. Here is video by Jeff Cremer -

Late last week, we revealed that the elaborate, fenced-in spires spotted in the Peruvian Amazon are made by spiders. We were with a team of scientists on the ground in Peru, who watched as three spiderlings hatched from eggs concealed at the base of the towers...

So far, we’ve been able to confirm, using photos and descriptions, additional sightings in Ecuador and French Guiana... We’ve also gotten unconfirmed reports of sightings from Brazil, several places in the United States, and Belgium, and are awaiting photos from those locations...

For starters, based on the silk in the structures, it seems likely we’re looking at a spider in the superfamily Orbiculariae, says Leslie Brunetta, who’s studied the evolution of spider silk. This superfamily includes spiders that weave cribellate silk, which is fluffy and frizzy like the silk in the fences, as well as all the spiders that spin orb-shaped webs. Over time, some of these spiders’ descendants have modified their orb webs to the point that they no longer resemble the original orb shape. Brunetta suggests the corral could be one of these modified orbs, with sturdy fence posts connected by fluffy, cribellate silk...

One possibility is that it’s built simply to deter predators...
But it’s also possible the fences are acting to trap food for the spiderlings, such as mites, which were seen crawling inside and stuck on many of the fences.

A grateful tip of my hat to an anonymous reader for alerting me to the recent discovery.

"Carnivorous pitcher plants owe much of their efficacy to the viscoelasticity of their digestive fluid. A viscoelastic fluid’s resistance to deformation has two components: the usual viscous component that resists shearing and an elastic component, often derived from the presence of polymers,
that resists stretching - kind of like a liquid rubber band. It’s the
latter effect that’s important when it comes to the pitcher plant
trapping insects. When a fly or ant falls into the liquid within the
plant, it will flail and try to swim,
thereby straining the fluid. In part (c) of the image above, you can
see how long fluid filaments stretch as the fly moves; this is because
the digestive fluid’s extensional viscosity, the elastic component, is
10,000 times larger than its shear viscosity, the usual viscous
component, for motions like the fly’s. This viscoelastic fluid is so effective at trapping insects that, as seen in part (b) above, it has to be diluted by more than 95% before insects can escape it! "

"Three shots of my collection.
Two views are necessary to show the 35+ year pile of (mostly) paperbacks I have amassed. I have read all but the top three shelves in the right-hand photo. Those are the 10-year backlog of Unread Books....

The bottom three shelves are "non-science-fiction" titles... mostly detective and adventure/thriller types.
All the rest are of the general category of Science Fiction & Fantasy.
Regrettably, with the advent of the Internet, my book reading has greatly slowed. Too many Salted Peanuts online...!

The third picture is of my shelves of old reference and history. Might as well keep my 1980 Britannica; the InterT00b might go out, and I will want to look up Amphibia... Also shown: (tan and red) Science and Invention set. Lower level left- (dark blue) The Story of the Great War; right- (green with gold lettering) 1927 History of Nations. A few other items... circa 1900 Unabridged dictionary ... some Fringe Science / Fringe Technology publications... maps and atlases... Do I get a frosted cupcake from the Greek bakery for my Horrendous pile?"

Finals of the competition held in Fauske, Norway in 2012. This is high-quality video that looks great on full-screen.

The origin of the term boogie-woogie is unknown, according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the word is a reduplication of boogie, which was used for rent parties as early as 1913.
However, Dr. John Tennison, a San Antonio psychiatrist, pianist, and musicologist has suggested some interesting linguistic precursors. Among them are four African terms, including the Hausa word "Boog" and the Mandingo word "Booga", both of which mean "to beat", as in beating a drum. There is also the West African word "Bogi", which means "to dance", and the Bantu term "Mbuki Mvuki", which means, "Mbuki—to take off in flight" and Mvuki—"to dance wildly, as if to shake off ones clothes". The meanings of all these words are consistent with the percussiveness, dancing, and uninhibited behaviors historically associated with boogie-woogie music. Their African origin is also consistent with the evidence that the music originated among newly emancipated African Americans.

My
father, age 86, is on the final approach to the long dirt nap (to use
his own phrase). His mind is 98% gone, and all he has left is hours or
possibly months of hideous unpleasantness in a hospital bed. I'll spare
you the details, but it's as close to a living Hell as you can get.

If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago. And not once would we have looked back and thought too soon.

Because
it's not too soon. It's far too late. His smallish estate pays about
$8,000 per month to keep him in this state of perpetual suffering.
Rarely has money been so poorly spent.

I'd like to proactively
end his suffering and let him go out with some dignity. But my
government says I can't make that decision. Neither can his doctors. So,
for all practical purposes, the government is torturing my father until
he dies.

I'm a patriotic guy by nature. I love my country. But the government? Well, we just broke up.

And let me say this next part as clearly as I can.

If
you're a politician who has ever voted against doctor-assisted suicide,
or you would vote against it in the future, I hate your fucking guts
and I would like you to die a long, horrible death. I would be happy to
kill you personally and watch you bleed out. I won't do that, because I
fear the consequences. But I'd enjoy it, because you motherfuckers are
responsible for torturing my father. Now it's personal...

I might feel differently in a few years, but at the moment my emotions
are a bit raw. If I could push a magic button and send every politician
who opposes doctor-assisted suicide into a painful death spiral that
lasts for months, I'd press it. And I wouldn't feel a bit of guilt
because sometimes you have to get rid of the bad guys to make the world a
better place. We do it in defensive wars and the police do it daily.
This would be another one of those situations.

I don't want
anyone to misconstrue this post as satire or exaggeration. So I'll
reiterate. If you have acted, or plan to act, in a way that keeps
doctor-assisted suicide illegal, I see you as an accomplice in torturing
my father, and perhaps me as well someday. I want you to die a painful
death, and soon. And I'd be happy to tell you the same thing to your
face.

Note to my government: I'll keep paying my
taxes and doing whatever I need to do to stay out of jail, but don't
ask me for anything else. We're done now.

[Update: My father passed a few hours after I wrote this.]

There's more at the link. This is not a joke.

Blogger's addendum: During the last month of my father's life, I lived with him in a single-wide trailer on the Texas/Mexico border while he endured the agonies of prostate cancer metastatic to his bones. Every day and night I listened to him moaning because of pain that was not controlled by morphine sufficient to lock up his bowels. It was an unpleasant and undignified exit for a pleasant and dignified man.

I now have a 95-year-old mother who has repeatedly told me that when her time comes, I should "put her down." I hope that when that time arrives, some form of doctor-assisted suicide will be available in this country - but I doubt it. And I will continue to share Scott Adams' anger.

"Parker Liautaud, a 19-year-old geology student, has become the youngest man to
ski to the South Pole after completing the journey in 18 days. Along with his expedition partner Doug Stoup they set a new world record for
the fastest journey from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole

The pair skied for 349 miles (561) from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica on
December 3 and arrived at 13.43 on Christmas Eve in 18 days, four hours and
43 minutes. During the journey they pulled sleds weighing in excess of 80kg across the
Transantarctic mountain range in temperatures as low as minus 50 degrees
Celsius. The duo travelled for up to 12 hours a day, averaging 17 miles
(28km) per day.

They were followed behind by a vehicle which filmed the entire journey using
long-distance cameras, but offered them no support other than radio contact."

Addendum: And this -

Right now three people are competing in a bike race from the edge of
Antarctica to the South Pole. The winner will be the first person to
bike there ever. And 35-year-old Maria Leijerstam is attempting to trike
there on a really weird/badass-looking tricycle.

"Around 11 p.m. Christmas Eve, people reported hearing a loud “boom” in
Toronto, Newmarket, Aurora, Belleville, Richmond Hill, and Sutton. Not
only was the boom heard, but it rattled houses, leaving many to believe
that a tree had fallen on their rooftop...

The most likely explanation is that it was a cryoseism, also known as a frost quake.

Hospice patients are expected to
die: The treatment focuses on providing comfort to the terminally ill,
not finding a cure. To enroll a patient, two doctors certify a life
expectancy of six months or less.

But over the past decade, the number of “hospice survivors” in
the United States has risen dramatically, in part because hospice
companies earn more by recruiting patients who aren’t actually dying, a
Washington Post investigation has found. Healthier patients are more
profitable because they require fewer visits and stay enrolled longer.

The proportion of patients who were discharged alive from hospice care
rose about 50 percent between 2002 and 2012, according to a Post
analysis of more than 1 million hospice patients’ records over 11 years
in California...

This vast growth took place as the hospice “movement,” once led by
religious and community organizations, was evolving into a $17 billion
industry dominated by for-profit companies...

Some of those patients simply outlived a legitimate prognosis of six months.
But much of the data suggests that the trend toward longer stays is a response to the financial incentive... multiple allegations have arisen from former hospice workers who say
that the businesses took in people who weren’t in declining health.

A virulent form of
ransomware has now infected about quarter of a million Windows
computers, according to a report by security researchers. Cryptolocker scrambles users' data and then demands a fee to unencrypt it alongside a countdown clock...

Early examples were spread via spam emails that asked the user to
click on a Zip-archived extension identified as being a customer
complaint about the recipient's organisation. Later it was distributed via malware attached to emails
claiming there had been a problem clearing a cheque. Clicking the
associated link downloaded a Trojan horse called Gameover Zeus, which in
turn installed Cryptolocker onto the victim's PC...

It said of those affected, "a minimum of 0.4%, and very likely many
times that" had agreed to the ransom demand, which can currently only be
paid in the virtual currencies Bitcoin and MoneyPak...

"Anecdotal reports from victims who elected to pay the ransom indicate
that the Cryptolocker threat actors honour payments by instructing
infected computers to decrypt files and uninstall the malware," added
the security firm.

This year marked the start of what looks likely to be a sustained
decline of what had been the most pervasive of all social networking
sites. Young people are turning away in their droves and adopting other
social networks instead, while the worst people of all, their parents,
continue to use the service.

As part of a European Union-funded study on social media,
we are running nine simultaneous 15-month ethnographic studies in eight
countries. What we’ve learned from working with 16-18 year olds in the
UK is that Facebook is not just on the slide, it is basically dead and
buried. Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it.
Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the
children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post
about their lives. Parents have worked out how to use the site and see
it as a way for the family to remain connected. In response, the young
are moving on to cooler things.

Instead, four new contenders for the crown have emerged: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp.

There's more at the link about the reasons this change may be occurring. Of interest to me is that if Facebook is dying, that status has not yet been updated in the equity markets -

- because short-term out-of-the-money put options are very inexpensive. I've just fired off an email to a social-media-savvy 17-year-old relative for advice, but would also appreciate input from (young) readers of this blog.

Car rental companies can charge you extra for their "loss of use" while they fix a dent.

More than you really need to know about fake movie blood. "For the original Carrie, a combination of Karo syrup and food coloring looked great, but it was “sticky,” star Sissy Spacek later recalled: “When they lit the fires behind me to burn down the gym,” she said, “I started to feel like a candy apple.”

After a man didn't stop his car at a stop sign "Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a
colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert's anus,
rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found."

America's first known serial killers were the members of the Bender family. "The family built a one-room house near the Osage Trail... Travelers on the trail were welcome to refresh themselves
with a meal and resupply their wagons with liquor, tobacco, horse feed,
black powder, and food from the Bender home. And they often spent the
night...

From one point of view, the book is clearly "TMI," because I was in no need of 400 pages of information on this topic, but with some judicious skimming I found the process enjoyable because, as in the other book, he incorporates a lot of interesting material.

I learned, for example, how the "trail rope" dangling from early hot air balloons served as a useful "feedback loop" for maintaining a constant low altitude:

"This was a simple, self-regulating ballast device, which allowed a gas balloon to adjust its own height when flying at altitudes below five hundred feet... Whenever the ballon dropped closer to the ground, more trail rope - and hence more ballast weight - was transferred from the balloon basket to the earth. Thus lightened, the balloon would rise again to a new point of balance... So Green [in 1835] employed his trail rope with what now seems amazing insouciance across the whole countryside: dragging it crashing through lines of trees and hedgerows, hissing across fields of crops or cattle, and not infrequently lifting the odd tile or slab of stonework from church roofs or isolated barns... (p. 57)

Early attempts to reach maximum altitudes were fraught with the dangers of hypoxia for the participants -

- delineated by a dramatic account (p. 214) of near-death at the even-by-modern-standards-remarkable altitude of about over six miles, a record that would stand for over a century. Note that that altitude is higher than Mount Everest. Rapidly attained. Without supplemental oxygen.

I was pleased to read references to butterflies at high altitude: "Butterflies hover round the car of the balloon. Until today I imagined that those little things passed their short existence among the flowers of the fields, and that they never rose to any great height in the air. But in fact they rise higher than any of the birds of our forests, and soar to many thousands of metres above the ground..." (237)

The account of the siege of Paris in 1870 (see the post below this one) will interest philatelists because of the advent of balloon mail (and the incorporation of microfilm as a method to expedite the process). There is also extensive discussion of hot air balloons as monitoring devices during the U.S. Civil War.

Your Christmas dinner will undoubtedly be more nutritious, better tasting, and less exotic that that experienced by the French during the siege of Paris in 1870:

On 19 September 1870, Prussian forces encircled Paris... During the siege food became scarce and the populace were forced to turn to unusual sources for their meat...

Though there were large numbers of horses in Paris (estimates suggested between 65,000 and 70,000 were butchered and eaten during the siege) the supplies were ultimately limited. Champion racehorses were not spared (even two horses presented to Napoleon III by Alexander II of Russia were slaughtered) but the meat soon became scarce. Cats, dogs and rats were the next selection for the menu. There was no control over rationing until late in the siege, so while the poor struggled, the wealthy Parisians ate comparatively well; the Jockey Club offered a fine selection of gourmet dishes of the unusual meats including Salmis de rats à la Robert. There were considerably fewer cats and dogs in the city than there had been horses, and the unpalatable rats were difficult to prepare, so, by the end of 1870, the butchers turned their attentions to the animals of the zoos. The large herbivores, such as the antelope, camels, yaks and zebra were first to be killed. Some animals survived: the monkeys were thought to be too akin to humans to be killed, the lions and tigers were too dangerous, and the hippopotamus of the Jardin des Plantes also escaped because the price of 80,000 francs demanded for it was beyond the reach of any of the butchers. Menus began to offer exotic dishes such as Cuissot de Loup, Sauce Chevreuil (Haunch of Wolf with a Deer Sauce), Terrine d'Antilope aux truffes (Terrine of Antelope with truffles), Civet de Kangourou (Kangaroo Stew) and Chameau rôti à l'anglaise (Camel roasted à l'anglaise)...

By all accounts, elephant was not tasty. Thomas Gibson Bowles, who was in Paris during the siege, wrote that he had eaten camel, antelope, dog, donkey, mule and elephant and of those he liked elephant the least. Henry Labouchère recorded:

"Yesterday, I had a slice of Pollux for dinner. Pollux and his brother Castor are two elephants, which have been killed. It was tough, coarse, and oily, and I do not recommend English families to eat elephant as long as they can get beef or mutton."

[T]he condition that Wagner described as the “main plague of his life” was recurring headaches. The details presented in his writings and letters as well as the numerous diary records of his second wife, Cosima, confirm that Wagner had a severely disabling migraine disorder producing frequent migraine attacks, sometimes with aura...

The first scene of act 1 of the opera Siegfried provides an
extraordinarily concise and strikingly vivid headache episode. The music
begins with a pulsatile thumping, first in the background, then
gradually becoming more intense. This rises to become a directly
tangible almost painful pulsation.
While the listener experiences this frightening headache sensation,
Mime is seen pounding with his hammer, creating the acoustic trigger for
the musically induced throbbing, painful perception. At the climax Mime
cries out: “Compulsive plague! Pain without end!”...

This from a letter written by Wagner to Liszt:

My health, too, is once more so bad, that for ten days, after I had finished the sketch for the first act of Siegfried, I was literally not able to write a single bar without being driven away from my work by most tremulous headaches.

More at the link, including references to the scintillating auras in Wagner's music:

Mime, irritated, sings: “Loathsome light! Is the air aflame? What is it
flaring and flashing, glittering and whirring, what is swirling and
whirling there and flickering around? It glistens and gleams in the
sunlight’s glow. What is it rustling and humming and blustering there?”

I have been in Guantanamo Bay for almost 12 years now. I arrived on
Valentine’s Day in 2002, the day my youngest son, Faris, was born. I
have never seen him; nor have I seen my other three children or my wife,
all of whom live in south London, in years. I have been cleared to
leave here for over half of my time behind bars – first by the Bush
administration in 2007 and then by the Obama government in 2009 – and
yet I remain here.

My lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, comes to see me every three months
or so. I ask him to bring me books. When I am allowed to read, for a
short while it lifts the heavy gloom that hangs over me. Clive amuses
himself (and me) by testing what the censors will let through. It is
difficult to identify a consistent or logical basis for the censorship:
in months gone by, I have been allowed to read Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago did not make it through.

On his most recent visit in October, Clive gave me a list of the
titles he had dropped off for me, so I could let him know later which
books had been banned by what I prefer to call the “Guantanamo Ministry
of Information”. One was Booky Wook 2 by Russell Brand. I
understand that Brand uses too many rude words. I suppose you have to be
amused by that: the US military is solicitous of my sensitive nature
and wants to protect me from swearing. These are the same people who say
that all of us at Guantanamo are dedicated terrorists...

They censored Blasphemy: How the Religious Right Is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence
by Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard. I suppose that is
understandable, as well. They portray me as some kind of religious nut,
just because I am a person of faith. The God I believe in (Allah) seeks
only justice. But the US military would not want me reading that some
right-wing American people have interpreted their religion as mandating
the elimination of universal rights.

Finally, they banned Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, perhaps because the Russian author didn’t write No Crime but We’ll Still Have Some Punishment,
which would have been better suited to Guantanamo. After all, I (like
others) have had 4,360 days of punishment without ever being accused of
any offence.

There's a bit more of the letter at the link (via Boing Boing). I'm baffled by the existence of Guantanamo in general, but even beyond that, I cannot conceive of a reason to censor the reading material available to prisoners in the most secure prison in the world. What do the authorities fear??

The graph depicts the results of a pilot study comparing "being right" vs. "being happy," as reported in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal:

This might be the first study to systematically assess whether it is
better to be right than happy; a Medline search in May 2013 found no
similar articles. Our null hypothesis was that it is better to be right
than happy.

To be eligible participants had to be part of a couple and willing to take part in the study... It was decided without consultation that the female participant would
prefer to be right and the male, being somewhat passive, would prefer to
be happy... The female participant was blind to the hypothesis being tested, other than being asked to record her quality of life.

The intervention was for the male to agree with his wife’s every opinion and request without complaint...

Two participants were eligible and both (100%) were randomised... The data safety monitoring committee stopped the study because of severe
adverse outcomes after 12 days. By then the male participant found the
female participant to be increasingly critical of everything he did. The
situation had become intolerable by day 12...

The results of this trial show that the
availability of unbridled power adversely affects the quality of life of
those on the receiving end...

The study has some limitations. There was no trial registration, no
ethics committee approval, no informed consent, no proper randomisation,
no validated test instrument, and questionable statistical assessment.
We used the eyeball technique for single patient trials which, as
Sackett says, “more closely matches the way we think as clinicians.

More details of the methodology and discussion of the results at the source. For those unfamiliar with the BMJ, it's worth pointing out that this venerable medical journal has a long tradition of publishing papers in the Christmas issue that are written somewhat che(tongue)ek. See for example my 2010 posts on Mozart's 140 causes of death and Crocodile forceps? or alligator forceps?

I laughed too, but had some sympathy for the man because several years ago my wife and I decided it would be traditional and thriftier to cut down our own Christmas tree, but the two saws we used at the tree farm had blades encrusted with resin, so the process became tedious, wet, cold, messy, and unpleasant.

22 December 2013

A. A. Milne used the title first, in 1927. Now it's our turn, because today TYWKIWDBI celebrates its sixth birthday, so I will use this "blogiversary" to engage in a bit of omphaloskepsis.

My own personal sixth year was quite memorable - I was one of over 50,000 unwilling participants in the huge polio epidemic of 1952. After prolonged instituionalization and rehabilitation at the Sister Kenny Institute in Minneapolis, I was discharged ambulatory on my "sticks" in time to see a classic satin-bedecked (and satin-bearded) Santa Claus. I should think that in that December of 1952 the future must have looked bright and limitless (and endless).

Now it's my blog that's six years old, and the blogiversary provides a stimulus to muse about the future of this vehicle. Jason Kottke, one of the doyens of blogging, has just done the same thing, in an op-ed piece for the Nieman Journalism Lab. In his view the blogosphere has changed and the traditional blog is on its way out:

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will
finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and
they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come.
But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all
agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly
being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are
blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.

Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning
things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating
Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium. In 1997,
wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king.
Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or
Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings
with kids...

The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the
loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like
Facebook and Twitter. If you look at the incoming referers to a site
like BuzzFeed, you’ll see tons of traffic from Facebook, Twitter,
Reddit, Stumbleupon, and Pinterest but not a whole lot from blogs, even
in the aggregate...

Over the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted
onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new
species have now taken over. No biggie, that’s how technology and
culture work.

TYWKIWDBI is also changing slowly. By the end of the year, this blog will have accumulated about 14 million pageviews of about 12,000 posts, but as I look at the metrics, it's obvious that the traffic is decreasing -

- in part I believe because more viewers are accessing the material via RSS feeds, but also because my own productivity (in terms of number of posts) has decreased each year since the peak in 2009. The numbers at the right come from the archive in the blog's sidebar; this year's posts will total fewer than half the number from five years ago.

The drop in traffic actually doesn't distress me, because I derive no income from the blog, so I reflexly (and repeatedly) dismiss offers to "trade traffic." Visitors and viewers are important and relevant to me only insofar as they contribute to the content of the blog, via informed comments and interesting personal observations, and I am recurrently amazed by the variety of expertise and insight that readers here bring to the table. I'm always delighted when a previously silent "lurker" pops up to offer a piece of information or a viewpoint that had never occurred to me. That feedback reinforces my motto that "you learn something every day."

For the near future, this particular blog will soldier on. Subject material is not (and never has been) a problem - the links I have saved in my "for the blog" folders now total over a thousand - which is quite ridiculous, of course. Time is the only limiting factor. I enter 2014 in good health and spirits; family responsibilities, including an elderly demented parent will require some time commitment but will also keep me near home and the computer. I may or may not incorporate some new themes after the "show us your bookcase" series fades out.

Today I will celebrate the blogiversary by stepping out the door to be greeted by 6-8" of snow newly fallen overnight on top of the ice from yesterday's freezing rain, which I will dutifully clear from the driveway and sidewalk. Those of you who reside in subtropical climes don't realize how much you've missed out on the character-building experiences of the sometimes-frozen North.

17 December 2013

Human skin was removed from a corpse, tanned (or processed in another
way) and then used to cover a book. Harvard’s Houghton Library has one
from the 1880s (read more about it here),
but the one in this image is much older. Dating from the early 17th
century, this book seems to have been bound in the skin of the priest Father Henry Garnet,
who was executed in 1606 for his role in the Gunpowder Plot - the
attempt to ignite 36 barrels of gunpowder under the British Parliament.

"Our three-part library starts here, in the bedroom, on our fancy Home Depot particle-board shelves. They bow a bit, 'cause our studs aren't ideally placed, and we have too much media. Our books are mostly contemporary fiction, with some literary nonfiction and my grandmother's poetry books thrown in. These shelves have the first part of the alphabet: Louisa May Alcott to Carl Hiaasen, as well as some photo albums. You can see Shelly, my childhood Cabbage Patch Kid, staring at you benevolently from above. The shelves on the right have our CDs"

"Above is the weirdest thing in the house: my grandmother shrine. My grandmothers were both admirable ladies, so I decided to non-obviously memorialize them here. The white cloth is a khata, a Tibetan ceremonial scarf. I presented it in greeting to a lama, who blessed it and gave it back. The riding crops belonged to my maternal grandmother and are from Libya, where the family lived when my mom was young. The one in front has an iron spike in it. The silver coin purse belonged to my paternal grandmother. Inside are some Tibetan blessing pills given to me by the lama; I was supposed to swallow them, but I decided to do this instead. What does a secular humanist do when presented with sacred pills? She uses them to build a grandmother memorial.

To the right is the middle part of the alphabet: Homer to Jhumpa Lahiri, with heavy representation from John Irving and Stephen King. The bookshelf belonged to a former roommate. Note the attractively displayed cans of cat food.

This final section has the rest of our books. John LeCarré to Jeanette Winterson, as well as some reference and travel guides. The shelves were a wedding present from my mother-in-law; they're custom made by a local craftsman. Rob the cat, looking weirdly huge, supervises."

Blogger's note: This is the 32nd entry in what has become a very interesting series of reader's bookcases. And with the queue now depleted, it will be the last entry unless someone else out there has both a bookcase and a camera.

In one survey, about half of collegiate men required their date to be shorter, while a monstrous nine of every ten women said they would only date a taller man... Only four percent of heterosexual couples feature a shorter man...

Here’s how I figure it: If a man is comfortable with the fact that I’m taller, he’s also likely to be comfortable with the fact that I’m competitive and outgoing and career-oriented. As in: It means he’s a secure man.

Julia Child (6'2") said ""Being tall is an advantage, especially in business. People will
always remember you."

Nationmaster has a list of hundreds of famous tall women (and see bottom of the page for links to lists of famous short women, tall men, and short men).

Minnesota may spend more money performing the drug tests and implementing the program than it saves by denying benefits to drug users:

A new state law designed to prevent drug users from
receiving welfare benefits could end up costing taxpayers far more than
it saves, while inadvertently denying assistance to poor families
simply because they are unable to comply with its complex paperwork.

Like a recent wave of drug-testing laws
passed in other states, Minnesota’s legislation was touted as a way to
encourage greater responsibility among welfare recipients while saving
taxpayers money.

But many county officials and advocacy
groups say the reality is quite different: The law contains a bevy of
costly local mandates and complicated rules that apply to just a tiny
fraction of the 167,000 Minnesotans receiving welfare and other cash
benefits.

In 2013 alone, at least 30 states proposed bills related to drug
screening and testing, with some even extending it to federal benefits
such as unemployment insurance, according to the Center for Law and
Social Policy in Washington, D.C...

Just 0.4 percent of participants in the Minnesota Family Investment
Program, the state’s main cash welfare program, have felony drug
convictions, DHS records show. That compares with 1.2 percent of the
state’s adult population as a whole.

This may be the most salient comment:

“I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that this is about saving
taxpayers money,” said Heidi Welsch, director of family support and
assistance for Olmsted County. “This is punitive.”

According to the Financial Times (£), Facebook recently reported a pre-tax loss of €626,000 after it paid out those expenses.

In 2012, Facebook Ireland Ltd had 382 staff on its books in Dublin,
and reported a gross profit of €1.75bn and sales of €1.79bn for the
year...

The practice of avoiding tax in that way – known as Double Irish – is used by other internet giants such as Google, which shifts some of its money through a Bermuda shell company...

Facebook defended its actions by saying it "complies with all relevant
corporate regulations including those related to filing company reports
and taxation.

This would be a good time to quote U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes on the matter:

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the
hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital.
Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the
interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These
need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation,
on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive
change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the
people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations,
and for corporations.
Diary (11 March 1888]).

Of course we should also point out that the "presidential election of 1876 had been thoroughly corrupted by fraudulent vote counts in favor of each candidate (the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, both of them held captive by the banks)."

We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.

Which brings me to the point of this release. We are looking for new, inventive ways to navigate, find and display these 'unseen illustrations'. The images were plucked from the pages as part of the 'Mechanical Curator', a creation of the British Library Labs project. Each image is individually addressible, online, and Flickr provies an API to access it and the image's associated description.

16 December 2013

Artificial
sweeteners have been widely incorporated in human food products for aid
in weight loss regimes, dental health protection and dietary control of
diabetes. Some of these widely used compounds can pass non-degraded
through wastewater treatment systems...

In order to
determine the riverine concentrations of artificial sweeteners and their
usefulness as a tracer of wastewater at the scale of an entire
watershed, we analyzed samples from 23 sites along the entire length of
the Grand River, a large river in Southern Ontario, Canada, that is
impacted by agricultural activities and urban centres. Municipal water
from household taps was also sampled from several cities within the
Grand River Watershed. Cyclamate, saccharin, sucralose, and acesulfame
were found in elevated concentrations despite high rates of biological
activity, large daily cycles in dissolved oxygen and shallow river
depth. The maximum concentrations that we measured for sucralose (21
µg/L), cyclamate (0.88 µg/L), and saccharin (7.2 µg/L) are the highest
reported concentrations of these compounds in surface waters to date
anywhere in the world....

The effects of artificial sweeteners on
aquatic biota in rivers and in the downstream Great Lakes are largely
unknown.

The top image shows the sampling sites. The graph below demonstrates that the aquatic concentrations corrrelate with the size of the human population upstream from the sample sites:

According to an article in the Harvard Gazette, the idea that studying music improves intelligence is probably a myth:

Though it has been embraced by everyone from advocates for arts
education to parents hoping to encourage their kids to stick with piano
lessons, a pair of studies... found that music
training had no effect on the cognitive abilities of young children. The
studies are described in a Dec. 11 paper published in the open-access journal PLoS One.

“More than 80 percent of American adults think that music improves
children’s grades or intelligence,” Mehr said. “Even in the scientific
community, there’s a general belief that music is important for these
extrinsic reasons. But there is very little evidence supporting the idea
that music classes enhance children’s cognitive development.”

The notion that music training can make someone smarter, Mehr said,
can largely be traced to a single study published in Nature. In it,
researchers identified what they called the “Mozart effect.” After
listening to music, test subjects performed better on spatial tasks.

Though the study was later debunked, the notion that simply listening
to music could make someone smarter became firmly embedded in the
public imagination...

The solid red line in the gif is the "freezing line" forecast for this coming weekend (data and graphic from NOAA and Ham Weather, via Paul Douglas' On Weather). Here in Madison, Wisconsin the temperature hasn't been above freezing even once in December.

Today I discovered that Lady Gaga and Joseph Gordon-Levitt chose to reverse the traditional male-female stereotypes for this song when they performed it for a holiday special with the Muppets:

Compare the modern version with the original from the musical romantic comedy "Neptune's Daughter" from 1949, where the heavy-handed seduction of Esther Williams by Ricardo Montalban is almost painful to watch:

For starters, consider that there is not a single self-described atheist
in Congress today. Not one. It wasn’t until 2007 that Rep. Pete Stark, a
Democrat from Northern California, became the first member of Congress
and the highest-ranking public official ever to admit to being an atheist. (And even he framed it in terms of religious affiliation, calling himself
“a Unitarian who does not believe in a supreme being.”) Stark was
elected twice after this, but when the 20-term congressman lost his seat
last year, it was to a 31-year-old primary challenger who attacked him
as irreligious, citing, among other things, Stark’s vote against our
national motto: “In God We Trust.”...

The Cold War changed all that. Atheism began to seem almost treasonous
amid tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, because
the Soviets were officially and emphatically against religion. Sen.
Joseph McCarthy famously used the phrase “godless communists” to bash
the political left and others he considered his enemies. In this
context, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed laws in the mid-1950s inserting “God” into our Pledge of Allegiance and putting it on all our money.
(It had been on most coins earlier, but Eisenhower made “In God We
Trust” our national motto, henceforth to appear on all bills.)

It is great fun to see the bookcases (and collections).
My house is decorated in bookcases and maps, for the most part. In our humid climate, bookcases are against inside walls only.

Here are topically organized shelves, Chess set (tournament size) on the top, then some theory books, mountaineering guides and reports, bicycling, geology and ecology.

Full length shot of the pine board bookcases built by DearHusband,
decades ago now.
This one is filled with favorites (Nevil Shute and Robert Heinlein on
top shelf, and Make Way for Ducklings and Paddingtom Bear on the bottom)

The photo shows a portion of our bookcase.
At the top are stuffed animals from my daughter and son's childhood with a few cherished family photos.

On the center shelf are 1-1/2 rows of random books I intend to read. With few exception, I tend to donate my books after I've read them. I enjoy historical fiction and books in a series.

On the bottom shelf are books in a series by Clive Cussler that I'm collecting and saving for "someday" after all the other books have been read.
The black/tan German Shepherd stuffed dog was a gift (I have a German Shepherd dog), and the red dog has traveled the US with me as I chase helicopters for work. The two pieces of pottery (1 green and 1 tan) were hand made by my late cousin. The wooly lamb was a gift from a dear friend living in the UK.

11 December 2013

Our examination of nationwide trends indicates that grading practices were largely constant for decades, but grade
distributions have undergone gradual yet very significant changes since the 1960s. For the schools in our database, the
number of A’s awarded has increased to such a degree that A is now ordinary. On average, A is now by far the most
common grade awarded on American four-year campuses. Substandard grades, D and F, typically are awarded less than
10% of the time even on campuses with students of modest academic caliber.

Our data (Figure 1) show that in 1960, as in the 1940s and 1950s, C was the most common grade nationwide; D’s and F’s
accounted for more grades combined than did A’s. On average, instructors were assigning grades by using a slightly
skewed normal distribution curve centered at about a C+. By 1965, however, B had supplanted C as the most common
grade, and D’s and F’s were becoming increasingly less common. From the early 1960s
to the mid-1970s, grades rose
rapidly across the nation, and A became the second most common grade awarded...

The Vietnam era was followed by a decline in A’s that lasted for roughly a decade. Awarding of A’s began to rise again in
the mid-1980s. From 1984 to the mid-2000s, the proportion of A’s increased by a fact
or of 1.5. By 2008, A’s were nearly
three times more common than they were in 1960.

There are lots of things I don't/can't/will never understand. Quantum theory and string theory lead the pack...

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed
that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from
infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms
of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of
strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would
be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler,
flatter cosmos where there is no gravity...

Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles
our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten
dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The
lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its
menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs,
or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.

I'm not asking for an ELI5 explanation. I'm content to remain ignorant.

A New York Times article discusses hospital policies regarding visitation by "best friends":

But a few medical institutions have taken a different approach and
thrown open their doors to patients’ own dogs and cats, letting them
visit along with spouses, children and friends. (Lots of hospitals have
pet therapy programs using trained dogs, but that’s a different matter.)

The University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore lets family
pets visit their owners, so long as certain requirements are met, as
does the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics in Iowa City; Virginia
Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond; Rush University
Medical Center in Chicago; two hospitals associated with the Mayo Clinic
in Rochester, Minn.; and more than a dozen other medical centers...

Policies vary at the institutions that allow visits by patients’
pets, but many share some of the same requirements. A doctor’s order
allowing the family pet to visit is typically necessary, as is an
attestation from a veterinarian that the animal is healthy and up to
date on all its shots. Most institutions require that dogs — the most
common visitors, by far — be groomed within a day or so of a visit and
on a leash when they walk through hospital corridors. Cats must be taken
in and out of the institution in a carrier.

If a dog or cat wants to get up on a patient’s bed, a covering is
laid down first. If an animal seems agitated or distressed when it comes
into the hospital, staff members who meet the family and escort them to
the patient’s room have the right to turn it away. If the patient
shares a room with someone, that person must agree before a pet may
visit...

Although research has shown
that hospital therapy dogs can pick up germs and potentially transmit
bacteria that can cause dangerous infections, those animals typically
wander from room to room, while people’s own pets are expected to stay
with the patient they are visiting. If someone has an open wound or an
active infection, a visit from a family pet is discouraged, according to
most hospital policies...

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

The 2008 Weblog Awards

Category: Best New Blog

Translate

Search TYWKIWDBI

About Me

I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net